Page 84 of Ravishing Camille
Pierce nodded. “I make arrangements to begin that. Now. Here. Before I see her.”
“So then. She is not in Tours with a friend.” Liv’s statement reflected her understanding of how they’d gone away together.
“No.” He wouldn’t offer explanations.
Liv chuckled. “I wondered why Marianne said Camille had asked to go to Gare de l’Est when all trains from that station go east, not south to the Loire.”
Pierce tipped his head in apology. “A slip. She’s not used to fibbing.”
“Commendable,” Liv acknowledged.
“Camille returns to Paris tomorrow.”
“And you propose then?” Liv asked with a twinkle in her eyes.
“I do,” he said with a grin at the spark of delight at Liv’s acceptance.
“I hope you have something wonderful in hand to make that a reality,” she said with a wiggle of her brows.
He laughed at the ceiling. “I make my first stop to a jeweler.”
“Smart man.” Liv pointed a finger at him. “Pearls are my first purchase.”
* * *
As Pierce shrugged into his dinner coat, he dismissed for the evening the hotel valet whom he’d allowed the hotel to provide for him. A knock came at his sitting-room door.
“Shall I answer for you,Monsieur?”
“Please do, Albert.” He was about to take his dinner in the restaurant below with his manager of business here in Paris. Exploring new ways of working was his agenda and Pierce wished to honor the man who had worked for him for six years with a preview of his thinking on restructuring. This would be one of the last items on his agenda for business. Today, he’d visited the British and American embassies and the rector of the American Church in Paris. His last stop had been to a very fine jeweler on the Champs-Élysées. Tomorrow he’d have a long talk with the owner of a chateau near Chantilly about renting it for a year and then much of his work for his wedding and honeymoon would be done. He grinned at himself in the mirror.
Murmurs of an argument reached his ears.
A woman at his door demanded to see him.
Albert was fuming at her. “Madame!Monsieur, the lady was—”
“Pierce!” Marianne strode into his bedroom. Her face red with exertion, she was breathless.
“Marianne! What’s wrong? Albert, you may leave us. The lady is my aunt. Come sit down,” he said as he rushed forward to take her hands and lead her toward a chair. Earlier, he’d sent a message to her home that he would remain at the Meurice for a few days as he would be in an out of meetings and did not wish to disturb her household. Or her. She was far into her pregnancy and from the looks of her she was overwrought. “What’s the matter?”
“Is Camille here?”
He startled. “No.” Fear gripped him. “Why?”
Marianne sat, checking his expression. “Camille did not arrive at Gare de l’est this afternoon. I sent our coachman to fetch her at four but he never saw her.”
Pierce sat down with a thud. To keep up the ruse of visiting a friend, Camille was to have disembarked from the train from Tours at Montparnasse and taken a hack to Gare de l’est to meet Marianne’s coachman. “Perhaps she’s gone to Rue Haussmann instead of your house.”
“No. She did not go home. I’ve just come from there. Liv and Uncle Killian have had no word from her. Your father told me the two of you were together these past few days. Honestly, I’m not surprised. How could one look at the two of you and not guess? Where is she Pierce?”
“I don’t know.” It killed him to confess it. “But I—. She didn’t say a word to me about not returning today.”
“Where else might she have gone?”
And why?
Chapter 20
